About Me

An enthusiastic teacher turned librarian turned support engineer turned strategy & operations person, I have a diverse background and broad interests. While primarily working with web technology, I have interests in general computing and technology, instruction, accessibility, information management, technical services and metadata, and documentation among others.

I am always on the look out to improve existing services and implement new ones. While not a programmer or developer, I like to learn and I am not afraid to work with and dig into code. My methodology is very much user oriented in all my projects and work (at least as much as possible), and my aim is to improve the user experience and quality of life (at work) for team members.

Outside of GitLab, I mentor others through various programs, such as the Aspire mentorship program by Support Driven.

Last but not least, I help with organizing conferences and workshops whenever and wherever I can (see the list below).

You can contact and follow me on mastodon or find me elsewhere through about.me.

Current Employment

At GitLab (2018 – Present)

Staff, Strategy and Operations (Office of the CP(M)O (Chief Product (& Marketing) Officer)) (2025 Jan – Present); directly to CPMO (2026 Apr onwards)

  • Achieve results on assigned projects and activities
  • Translate practical needs into technical and/or business requirements
  • Fill in knowledge gaps of the Chief of Staff to the CPMO
  • Identify procedural gaps in existing workflows and work to resolve with optimization, automation, and data
  • Support the creation of prepared materials (documents, decks) for the Chief of Staff to the CPMO
  • Support special projects that are urgent and important
  • Execute on projects and ongoing assignments for the Chief of Staff to the CPMO
  • Readiness to partner directly with the CPMO, CoST to the CPMO, or other Strategy and Operations team members on high priority initiatives
  • Determine long-term owners outside of the Strategy and Operations team for initiatives and asks that are best served through a functional home. Partner with future owners to ensure that ownership and responsibilities are understood and agreed upon
  • Demonstrate GitLab values in all work

Staff, Strategy and Operations (Office of the CEO, formerly named Chief of Staff to CEO Team) (2023 Nov – 2024 Dec)
Select accomplishments, see below and 6th year reflection post.

  • Assumed ownership of the Handbooks and related projects with no prior knowledge of the tech stack, stabilizing the build system, resolving 12,000+ linting errors, and cutting pipeline times in half — then transferred ownership to Learning & Development through a structured handover plan.
  • Organized the Unconference at GitLab’s 2023 full-company in-person Summit (2,000+ team members), scheduling 250+ sessions, coordinating Legal, DIB, People, and Health & Safety reviews. Received widespread positive attendee feedback.
  • Helped relaunch the CEO Shadow Program after an extended hiatus by reviewing and updating all program materials and leading the inaugural “teach” week for the first rotation.
  • Contributed to company-wide communications (such as Quarterly Kickoff and Assembly) across multiple quarters, drafting and editing Slack posts or selected slides and talk track content, running recording logistics, and reviewing edited videos.
  • Executed ownership transitions for multiple stalled initiatives back to functional teams, including the TeamOps program to Education Services, through documentation, training, and formal handover.
  • Provided cross-functional support, including attending select CEO calls to drive action item follow-through, researching possible customer-requested feature requests, and supporting programs led by other OCEO team members.
  • Translated business needs into technical/business requirements, advising various teams on GitLab’s product and processes, bridging knowledge gaps across departments, such as integrating third-party services through API usage.
  • Supported recurring OKR cycles through data entry, quality checks, follow-ups, and incremental process improvements in partnership with the Chief of Staff to the CEO.
  • Identified procedural gaps/challenges and resolved with optimization, automation, or data, such as moving Group Conversations from sync to async, and using triage bots for managing a large number of work items.

Staff Support Engineer (2022 Feb – 2023 Nov)

Select accomplishments, see below and reflection posts: first 5th year, third 5th year, first 6th year.

  • Identified and drove prioritization of high-impact product improvements, including a password reset feature (mention in ~700 tickets), and unconfirmed user auto-deletion which removed 320,000+ accounts.
  • Drove Support’s involvement in the cross-functional Enterprise Users initiative, connecting Auth, Legal, Security, Marketing, and Support to implement domain verification, 2FA improvements, and user claiming at scale.
  • Contributed code directly to GitLab to resolve customer issues and reduce ticket volume, including a Vue MR adding delayed deletion UI text (resolving 170+ tickets), domain verification improvements, and admin panel enhancements for SAML/SCIM visibility, and started quarterly hackathons to encourage team code contributions.
  • Served as Auth team counterpart, scoping feature MVCs, negotiating 10% of milestone weight for Support priority issues, producing impact analyses, and coordinating the end-of-life migration of all customers off Group Managed Accounts.
  • Collaborated with the Technical Writing team as the primary counterpart, including co-leading a joint OKR to consolidate and move troubleshooting docs.
  • Collaborated with Fulfillment engineers to rewrite a problematic Customers Portal console function, eliminating data integrity issues, and led a full review of console write functions.
  • Invested in team growth by organizing Staff and Senior Support Engineer AMAs, continued coaching engineers through promotion documents (completing 10+), drafting a new Senior promotion template, assisted others to move forward on issues, and on stalled/long-running tickets.
  • Became a GitLab Handbook Maintainer, actively contributing to and reviewing MRs, helping migrate the Support handbook, and centralizing internal wiki and other content into the internal handbook.
  • Continued mentoring through the GitLab Women’s TMRG and company mentorship programs, and externally through Support Driven’s Aspire program, including helping mentees get promoted.

Strategy and Operations Internship with the Office of the CEO Team (2023 Mar – 2023 Oct)

Acting Chief of Staff to CTO (2022 Nov – 2023 Jan)

Senior Support Engineer (2020 May – 2022 Jan)

Select accomplishments, see below and reflection posts: 3rd year, first 4th year, second 4th year

  • Diagnosed and resolved complex enterprise SAML/SCIM issues, such as identifying an allowed_clock_drift issue resolvable with a small infrastructure change rather than developer work — then documenting to prevent recurrence.
  • Stepped in when needed during incidents and customer emergencies, including deescalating a SAML access emergency and working directly with Auth developers to diagnose an inability to access projects.
  • Contributed product code, including surfacing SAML provider ID in admin to reduce investigation time, and adding self-serve wording to the account deletion screen — creating savings equivalent to over one full-time Support Engineer.
  • Expanded support tooling and efficiency by building Customers Portal console functions for subscription troubleshooting.
  • Led a major overhaul of SAML/SCIM documentation, ensuring consistency between SaaS and self-managed content, and updating guides across multiple identity providers.
  • Drove support efficiency improvements including leading the 2FA account recovery process overhaul.
  • Helped coalesce the SaaS and Self-Managed support subteams by reorganizing onboarding, aligning ZD problem types, and working with product to enable the Auditor role to bypass SSO and IP restrictions.
  • Helped define and shape the Senior Support Engineer role by hosting office hours, and coaching team members through promotion documents.
  • Assisted with hiring, including behavioural interviews for Support, and Technical Writing.
  • Participated in CEO Shadow program, contributing handbook and pricing page changes.
  • Mentored team members through the GitLab Women’s TMRG and company mentorship programs, and externally through Support Driven and BCLA.
  • Contributed to DIB initiatives through Women’s TMRG and its L&D subcommittee, Global Voices TMRG, and events, such as Career Transition Panel.

Support Engineer (2020 Jan – 2020 Apr)

Select accomplishments, see below and reflection post: 2nd year

  • Participated in the GitLab.com Incident Management rotation, providing emergency customer response in coordination with the Production team.
  • Debugged complex customers portal issues, including tracking down missing trial-to-.com links and resolving subscription association failures.
  • Investigated and escalated a security incident involving possible unauthorized subgroup access, filing an S1 issue in coordination with the Security team.
  • Contributed to a joint Support-Docs OKR by authoring Authentication-related documentation MRs, ensuring all MRs had assignees, and running the retrospective.
  • Continued to improve support workflows, including transitioning Gold Group requests out of Support.
  • Created and improved training modules, including adding Group SAML content, and a new GitLab.com Escalation and Console module.
  • Strengthened team hiring by reviewing applications and assessments, and conducting interviews.
  • Paired with every member of the support team, creating a template to encourage others to do the same.

Senior Support Agent (2019 Feb – 2020 Apr)

Select accomplishments, see below and reflection posts: 1st year, 2nd year

  • Developed deep technical expertise in SAML/SSO, Import, CI, and API, becoming the team’s go-to resource for complex enterprise authentication and migration issues.
  • Resolved advanced customer escalations requiring console read access to GitLab.com production, and console write access to the Customers Portal.
  • Improved product documentation to reduce ticket volume, including GitLab.com limits, subscriptions, and comprehensive SAML/SCIM setup guides with videos for AzureAD, OneLogin, and Okta.
  • Drove product improvements from frontline customer knowledge, including advocating for Group SAML user flow enhancements, such as owner bypass of SSO enforcement, and SAML state exposure via API.
  • Improved support team efficiency through process and workflow improvements, including the log requests workflow, and further improvements to the project imports workflow.
  • Contributed to support tooling, including adding email search to ChatOps and improving the Support Portal ZenDesk theme.
  • Served as a counterpart (liaison) to the UX and Technical Writing teams, providing accessibility consulting and feedback on docs processes affecting Support respectively.
  • Improved hiring quality by drafting a new technical interview, and an updated take-home assessment for candidates.
  • Levelled up team technical knowledge, such as by organizing pairing and cross-region ticket working sessions.

Support Agent (2018 Jun – 2019 Jan)

Select accomplishments, see below and reflection post: 1st year

  • Promoted to first-ever Senior Support Agent at GitLab in under 10 months by proactively taking on work beyond ticket resolution, including filing bugs, improving documentation, and collaborating across teams.
  • Improved Auto DevOps troubleshooting efficiency by advancing from multi-response bug reports to independently reproducing and filing issues directly.
  • Advocated for customers by driving process and workflow improvements, such as obtaining a patch exception to expedite a bug fix and establishing a project imports workflow, as well as updating the DMCA and issue creation workflows.
  • Improved product documentation to help customers self-serve and reduce ticket volume, including updating SAML SSO docs and correcting inaccurate curl commands discovered through customer tickets.
  • Implemented internal support tooling and automations to improve team efficiency, including Zendesk macros, an internal services tracker, and a shared Kubernetes cluster for testing.
  • Collaborated cross-functionally, such as with the UX team on the first accessibility report (VPAT).
  • Mentored teammates through pairing sessions, frequently as the most senior resource on the call, and led handbook MR walkthroughs for the team.

I also freelance and consult in various areas as time permits, including

  • accessibility,
  • web services,
  • user experience,
  • metadata and technical services,
  • automation and workflow,
  • documentation and technical writing, and
  • project management.

Previous Employment

My previous professional experience includes:

  • website redesign/development,
  • web accessibility,
  • user studies/user experience,
  • documentation,
  • accessible digital and physical materials,
  • supervision,
  • library systems administration,
  • collaborative software (such as wiki) implementation and administration,
  • cataloguing,
  • information management,
  • project management,
  • change management,
  • process and workflow improvement,
  • reporting,
  • research,
  • planning,
  • collection management,
  • reference,
  • training, and
  • instruction.

For details, please see my LinkedIn profile.

Other previous experience include teaching, research support, tutoring, office/clerical support, and customer service.

Current and Recent Volunteering

Recent Speaking & Writing

Education

I finished my Master’s in Library and Information Studies (MLIS) at the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies (SLAIS) in December 2011 and officially graduated in May 2012.

Previously, I completed a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Psychology, then a Bachelor of Education also at UBC, but began as a student in Software Engineering and Mathematics (at what is now SFU Surrey, but used to be TechBC).

Selection of Work

My previous presentations, articles, and blog posts cover accessibility, web technology, library services, managing projects and teams, and work/community culture. Since continually adding to the list will get too long, a selection of all blog posts and externally published work is below, broken down by topic, then in reverse chronological order:

My journey

Career Development

Work/Community Culture & Similar

Accessibility

Topics without recent additions

Project Management & Workflow

Technical Services, Library Collections, & Metadata

(Web) Design, Development, User Experience & Usability